


if wishes were fishes

by twoif



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon - Movie, Gen, Room of Requirement, Vanishing Cabinets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-25
Updated: 2016-07-25
Packaged: 2018-07-26 17:19:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7582981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twoif/pseuds/twoif
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five things Draco Malfoy never finds in the Room of Requirement.</p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p><br/><em>Magical travel</em>, the book reads, <em>is not about the process. It is about the destination. The key to an instantaneous journey between two points is to envision them as existing in the same place. The moment one considers the distance between them, the magic has failed.</em></p>
  <p>Draco manages his first successful cabinet spelling the next day: an apple he had pocketed after breakfast. It comes through unharmed, almost like it had never left at all. </p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	if wishes were fishes

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [July 2009](http://two-if-by-sea.livejournal.com/220586.html).

1.

Birds.

A whole flock of them. Covering everything, so that he almost can't see the cabinet through the flurry of their wings. Tiny ones, no bigger than the size of his palm. Mostly white, but some of them are a pale light green.

He doesn't do anything that day. He just sits down on a chest filled with broken potions vials and watches them stir up dust as they flit from corner to corner. One of them lands on his shoulder. Its grasp is surprisingly sharp, but the touch of its feathers against his cheek when it departs is the lightest thing he has ever felt.

 

2.

His father's cane, which he had been unable to find after Blaise got into a row with Goyle and hexed Goyle's stuff out of a window in the Astronomy Tower. When he discovered it was missing, Draco suspected that his cane had just been accidentally mixed in with the rest of Goyle's mess. He was furious for days anyway, and Goyle had mutely piled food so high on Draco's dinner plate that the rest of the table almost ran out, to make up for it.

Also, under the cane, an old tome, translated from Italian into condescending, half-hearted English. Draco recognizes it from a trip he and his parents had taken to Rome the summer before his second year. They had stayed with a distant uncle, and one evening when his father had ordered him to stay in while he and his mother attended an evening party, Draco read through some of his uncle's older magical texts.

The book is not an exact replica. This one is newer, with a crisper binding. Still, though, Draco can flip to the exact page that he remembers the best.

It's an explanation of the root of apparition. _Magical travel_ , the book reads, _is not about the process. It is about the destination. The key to an instantaneous journey between two points is to envision them as existing in the same place. The moment one considers the distance between them, the magic has failed._

Draco manages his first successful cabinet spelling the next day: an apple he had pocketed after breakfast. It comes through unharmed, almost like it had never left at all.

 

3.

Harry Potter. Or someone who looks like him, anyway. Draco enters the room and for a minute or two he doubts it but then there Potter is, sitting with his legs curled up and leaning against the closed doors of the cabinet.

"You're not supposed to be able to come in," Draco says dumbly. "It's not supposed to let two of us in at the same time--"

"It's okay, Malfoy," Potter says, smiling a bit goofily. He looks so incredibly harmless with his chin tucked into his knees, like he can't possibly be The Boy Who Lived or the Chosen One or whatever, and Draco is so stunned he doesn't know what to do, and he opens his mouth to tell Potter to get out, right now, _how dare he,_ when Potter says, "I know all about it. I know what you're doing."

"No you don't," Draco says automatically.

"I do," Potter says, unfolding his body and standing up to brush at the edges of the curtain hiding the cabinet. "You've worked awfully hard at it, haven't you?"

"You don't even _know_ \--" Draco snaps, rushing over to knock Potter's hand protectively away from his cabinet.

Potter doesn't get angry. Instead, he pulls Draco down to the floor by a powerful hand on his wrist and says, "Tell me about it."

" _No_ ," Draco hisses. " _Get out._ "

"It's okay," Potter says soothingly. "I want to help."

Which is ridiculous, of course, and Draco sincerely doubts that Harry actually wants to help him kill Dumbledore, but Harry is the first living thing in this room with Draco since the dead bird, and Draco hasn't slept for three days, and so he finds himself saying, without meaning to, words coming like vomit in his mouth, "You don't understand, _no one can help_ , I'm all alone, it's so difficult and I've been doing it all alone--"

He tells Potter almost everything, and Potter nods at the right places and makes the right noises and even at one point examines Draco's collection of things that have come back from Borgin's: a shriveled apple core, a bird carcass, a whole collection of eagle feather quills, a piece of parchment marked with an x, a picture of Draco's mother, one of Crabbe's socks (which neither of them touch and instead prod with their wands). Draco tells him, _It's awfully advanced magic_ , not without a hint of pride, and Potter says, _I don't even understand half the things you're telling me_ , without a hint of smugness.

Finally he runs out of things to say, and before he can be horrified with himself, Potter gets up, takes him by the wrist again, and starts dragging him towards the blank wall that leads them into the Hogwarts hallway. "Let's go."

"Where?"

"Dumbledore's, of course. I'll explain everything. I'll get it sorted out."

"You don't understand," Draco says again, for the hundredth time.

"Don't worry," Potter says, disappearing into the wall first. "Your mum and dad will be fine, let's go."

And Draco wants to protest, _how would you know?_ and _you don't understand, the Dark Lord is going to kill me_ and _you insufferable git, I'm supposed to kill Dumbledore, not ask him for bloody advice!_ but then he's no longer in the Room of Requirement, and Potter is gone, and when he rounds the corner to catch up with him, he almost runs straight into Potter, who is just standing in the middle of the hallway, wearing a completely different cloak and an expression of surprise and suspicion and guilt on his face, and Potter says to him, accusingly, "Malfoy, where did you just _come_ from?"

There are delusions, and then there are the things Draco knows you can find in the Room of Requirement. They're lies that feel so good you will wish they're real, and when you do, they are.

 

4.

A bed.

He works on the cabinet up until the last minute, testing and perfecting and making sure and in the afternoon he blacks out from nerves and the lack of sleep and food. When he comes to, the cabinet is gone. He has his face pressed into austere white sheets, his hand curled around a pillow. The entire room is empty except for him and this bed, and he crawls into it without thinking twice.

When he wakes up again, he is in the hospital bay. It is dusk, almost evening. He is still wearing his suit, and every fold of it is clean and crisp. He is lying on the bed like a corpse, the blanket tucked around him so tight he has to fight to loosen his arms.

He gets back to the cabinet just in time to let his aunt Bella and two other Death Eaters out.

 

5.

Salvation.

Which, in the end, is all he ever wanted.

(The Room of Requirement was never built by any wizard; rather, it simply came into being one day after years and years of needs and wishes and desires. Being formed by no one hand, it operates on rules that even highly intelligent wizarding inventors can only guess at.

Yet no matter how hard you might wish for it, salvation can never be wished into existence. It must be fought for.

And later on Draco might understand this. Later on, he might get to seize it and hold it and taste it. But for the moment, he is holding the dead body of a small white bird in his two hands, and he is crying.)

 

 

 

_these kids are all begging to trade their ghosts away_  
_and let them fade and let them…_  
_All of their open smiles just sit and wait, to sing a brutal song._

"Lions and Tigers", Asobi Seksu


End file.
